Word: diem
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Just before South Viet Nam's doughty President Ngo Dinh Diem set off last week on a four-day state visit to neighboring Thailand, he was tactially informed that his favorite white sharkskin suit would not be proper at the Royal Thai court. He dispatched an aide on an emergency trip to Hong Kong, but when Diem took one look at the Western-style cutaway, striped pants and grey top hat that the aide brought back, he snorted in disgust and refused to wear them...
Next day when Diem's C-47 touched down at Bangkok's spick-and-span military airport, the President disembarked to review the waiting honor guard, clad instead in his national Vietnamese dress: blue silk mandarin gown and black Tonkinese turban. The mandarin gown reflected more than a mere impulsive presidential whim: it symbolized a complicated and many-faceted change that has come about in President Diem's political thinking in recent months...
...moral impact is beginning to be felt, e.g., in the Republic of South Viet Nam, which U.S. aid and Vietnamese enterprise have transformed in less than three years from a war-ravaged country into a notable anti-Communist bastion. There doughty President Ngo Dinh Diem (TIME, May 20) is now lifting a standard that attracts many another Asian leader: he is providing remarkable proof that economic planning can be successfully combined with the classical values of Asia...
...Diem and his fellow leaders across anti-Communist Asia-from Korea to the Philippines-a U.S. capitulation to Peking, either by dramatic act or slow erosion, would be a catastrophe. To the U.S.'s Asian flank in the cold war, it would be a mortal blow...
...stated person to person with proud, doughty little Ngo Dinh Diem, these important underpinnings of free-world policy -and U.S. aid-regained something of the lustrous shine that they deserve...